Parity-violating electromagnetic interactions in QED_3 at finite temperature

Abstract

We study the parity-breaking terms generated by the box diagram in 2+1 dimensional thermal QED. These lead, in the long wave limit, to a gauge invariant extensive action which behaves as 1/T at high temperature. In contrast, the effective action in the static limit involves leading non-extensive terms proportional to 1/T^3 at high temperature, which violate large gauge invariance. We derive a non-linear large gauge Ward identity, which relates the leading static terms of different order in perturbation theory and whose solution coincides with the all order effective action proposed earlier.